Nozick

so we're going to be looking at nozick's theory of distributive justice nozick was a professor at harvard for his entire career he was a colleague of john rawls and developed his theory in part as an alternative to the rosian picture he wrote a variety of influential books the first one the one we're going to be discussing anarchy state and utopia which won a national book award in 1974 but also philosophical explanations the nature of rationality and the structure of the objective world he died tragically when he was really quite young he was also strikingly handsome as you'll see made all other male philosophers feel inadequate anyway came up with a theory of distributive justice i want to remind you what that is it's really the question of how the goods and responsibilities of society ought to be distributed amongst members so it's a question not only of how the rewards that society generates ought to be distributed but also how the tasks how the responsibilities of society ought to be generated philosophers tend to focus much more on the first question than on the second but it really is part of the same problem now nozick urges us from the very beginning to keep in mind that a lot of responsibilities and a lot of goods come attached to particular people let's say you have a child well then it seems odd to say oh i've had this baby now who should take care of it let's figure out how to assign the responsibilities here it's your child or similarly if you make something let's say you go out in your backyard and you cut down part of a tree and you craft something out of wood it seems odd to say then well then who gets the wooden sculpture that you created you made it right and so a lot of goods a lot of responsibilities come attached to particular people just because of the way they're generated now becomes a question then of looking at this in the context of who actually makes these goods who undertakes these responsibilities and so on there are a number of kinds of theories that have been developed of distributive justice nozick i think presents a very helpful characterization of some of these and a classification first of all some theories are end result theories they look at justice purely in terms of the resulting balance the resulting balance of responsibilities the resulting balance of goods in a society they don't really care who does what or who has you know what goods it's just a question of you might say a structural judgment you could just look at a graph and determine the degree of justice from this point of view and so it's a question really of yes how things in the society are generally distributed the identity of particular people who has what doesn't really matter according to that kind of theory a pattern theory is somewhat different it says the justice of a distribution depends on its matching certain natural dimensions so there's something you're trying to match in distributing goods or distributing responsibilities you're just to the extent that you actually match that previously existing thing so a pattern theory nicely fits into this kind of pattern from each according to blank to each according to blank the first from each according to blank is determining how to distribute the responsibilities the responsibilities of society go to those according to blah blah blah and then the good should be proportional to something else and you can fill in those slots with a variety of other things to make it a pattern theory they have to be some natural dimension i.e something that isn't just the results of people's activity but i don't know um well we'll see lots of examples of thinking about this and think of the various possibilities of filling in the blanks so in addition to having that categorization of theories and those will argue for a third kind of theory a historical theory it's also helpful to have some test cases in mind some familiar problems of distribution that we might think about so let's think about these particular cases one is just a problem of poverty okay that's one of the main test cases that people think about in connection with distributive justice what should we say about poverty the poor will always be with us we've been assured well yes but there are conditions that are better or worse to generate more poverty or less poverty and so becomes a question of what we really say about that in philosophical terms a second one familiar to all of us is grading i will be faced with a problem of distribution at the end of this course i will have grades to distribute to whom should i distribute them well i might have all sorts of different theories of that and in fact professors do turn up different theories of that then think about a vegetable garden i grow some vegetables and actually i don't grow vegetables in my backyard i tried it once only to find out right when i moved into my house i thought i will plant a garden i own a house i'll plant a garden and so i did and things grow grew very very well until like the first part of june when they all died and then i dug a little deeper and realized that there was this much soil and then sheer limestone so like nothing grows in my yard uh well actually now something grows i decided to go the native plant group and what is a native indigenous plant it's basically what people call a weed so everybody thinks my yard is a horrible mess but at least something's growing there right so i keep telling everybody look this is this is good this is xeriscape and they just say yeah this is awful in any case there's also the case the test case is my most valuable possession so one thing that my brother has told me that when i die he wants will to him and i have it for you here there it is and if you can't see that well it's this okay it's an official ball from the 1979 world series signed by bowie commissioner okay now well think about those cases and think well what is fair in each of those cases do i justly own the baseball what's a fair distribution of grades and so on well we've seen there are different kinds the end result theory says that the justice can be judged structurally remember the identity of people doesn't matter so we have to look at large-scale facts about society to answer questions about just distributions so what are people who are concerned with end result theories do well they show you things like this for example this is a map of chicago by income so i think if i remember correctly the red areas are kind of middle class the yellow ones are sort of poor the blue ones are fairly affluent and blah blah blah and so people concerned with structural theories of justice look at things like this and say how even is the distribution where are the poor people where the wealthy people and so forth or they look at charts like this that give you the distribution of annual household income in the united states with the median being about here the top 25 line being here things tailing off until you get to over 250 000 and then it gets bigger and so on um or they look at charts like this this is a genie index of inequality for families and it shows you the historical pattern shows you this in the united states declining with well more or less until when about 1968 when you start seeing a significant increase or this kind of thing where you do a similar measurement with the countries of the world and look at degrees of inequality within various societies where here the bluish green is the most equality and then the red is the most and purple is the most inequality or here is that by a different measure or people just show you photographs like this of the wealthy in the background with the poor in the front here sort of sharp contrast this is a city in india or perhaps just concerned with levels of absolute poverty such as a person like this a poor beggar in india well in any case those are all the kinds of things that people focus on when they're having in the back of their heads at least if not in the front an end result theory they're just looking at degrees of inequality and levels of poverty and so on a pattern theorist doesn't do that a pattern theorist says look you've got to match something and so what is that going to mean well yeah we're going to look for things to fit the pattern so let's think quickly about some theories of justice we've talked about during this term rousseau he says tolerate neither richmond or beggars why beggars don't have a stake in the social contract and the rich can manipulate the system to their own advantage and so you've got to avoid extremes you've got to limit inequality what kind of theory is rousseau presenting there it's an end result theory right he's concerned that nobody be too wealthy nobody be too poor who is the who are these wealthy people who are the poor it doesn't matter you just look at the overall distribution or we talked about roles as theory where we have this general principle about equal basic liberties but then also principles of justice that tell us that inequalities have to be arranged everyone's advantage so he says really in the end that comes down to the following maximize the welfare of the least advantage well what kind of theory is that well democratic welfare yes but in terms of end result theories or pattern theories what kind of theory is that and result theory right you're just looking at levels of poverty who are the least advantaged people in society choose the social arrangements that will produce a higher level for those at the bottom marx has this sort of theory from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs what kind of theory is that well it's not exactly an end result theory because i can't just look at the distribution of responsibilities and goods and determine whether it's just i've got to see whether the responsibilities distribution matches abilities and i've got to see where the distribution of whether the distribution of goods matches needs so i need something additional right so this is a pattern theory he says there are certain natural things natural dimensions like abilities and needs and those are relevant to determining the outcome so a pattern theorist needs additional information beyond that that an end result theorist needs you need something about something else if this is supposed to be magic and and by the way a lot of the objections to marx's theory come down to not how he fills in these things in particular but the fact that he fills them in with different things an alternative to that is aristotle's theory he says look justice is a matter of getting what you deserve and so you ought to distribute goods and responsibilities according to merit he fills in the blanks with the same thing merit so those who have the most political virtue for example have the greatest responsibilities to the community but also deserve the positions of political power within the community so responsibilities and goods go together for aristotle they come apart for marx and that's a fundamental feature of the marxist view that at least many people think leads to all sorts of problems well now aristotle doesn't just think in terms of one kind of merit goods have to be distributed according to merit of the relevant kind so we asked the following question suppose we have a flute let's imagine that there is i don't know somebody gives this class a flute that would be an odd thing to do but suppose somebody does or let's say there's only one flute in all of austin who should get that flute good the best flute player right the person who can actually play the flute the best and so you might think yes who gets the flute the best flute player that's aristotle's example if you want a real person there's a friend of mine who plays the flute alex koch and so you might think yeah if alex is the best blue player alex gets the flute well there are all sorts of things like that they're distributing guitars who gets the best guitars the best guitar players anybody identify that guy it's one of my best friends in high school no oh well that's jacksoni from dire straits playing money for nothing okay or who gets the gold medals at the olympics the people who do the best right do we say well let's look at the countries involved and let's try to maximize maximize the well for the least advantage what's a country that never wins anything at the olympics yeah i don't know whatever you fill in the blank for that country uh you know that okay maybe we should give them some medals because they don't want to get no we say in this case it's the women's luge the whoever gets the gold medal should be the one who performs best in the women's luge competition or similarly here for the skating competition or who should get the lombardi trophy the winner of the super bowl right the best team or who should win the oscars well the best actors and actresses and so on now there are lots of different theories then that we've looked at about how you should do these things two of those are end result theories two of those are pattern theories and you could come up with many other variations on these themes once you see the pattern so here's what we would ask take something like my possession of the baseball is it just what question do i have to ask according to rousseau well does it make me rich no right my possession of the baseball does not suddenly allow me to manipulate the political process i wish it were oh baseball let the next governor be but it doesn't work okay that does not nothing to let me manipulate the political processes does it make me a beggar or make anyone else a beggar no um beyond that does it promote the common good well i don't know that seems like a big and complicated question about whether my possession of baseball promotes the common good according to rawls i have to say well does it make the least advantage worse off i don't think so um but that again is a kind of large-scale social question marx will say well do you need it i don't need the baseball but actually nobody needs this baseball right baseballs are kind of luxury items especially if you're not a baseball player and in particular a historical artifact like this from the 1979 world series nobody really needs it so it's hard to say how marx's theory helps us here aristotle says do i deserve it well what would be the relevant kind of merit baseball merit do i deserve it in those terms well as we'll see almost surely not but but that's a question of how i got it and so let's just skip ahead to some other test cases grading how should i distribute grades at the end of the course hundreds for everybody well that's one possibility uh actually i knew a guy there was a professor at my college who did that he taught modern american poetry he just said to everybody at the beginning yeah everybody gets an a and so you know you're supposed to do what you want to do because you love poetry not because you're scrubbing for a grade um i never took that course i thought that's ridiculous okay i thought that was ridiculous well ridiculous why because it seemed to me that it basically said i'm not going to evaluate anything you're doing and if i take a course on poetry it's either because i want to learn something about poetry or because i want to become a better poet or something like that well if you're not going to evaluate me tell me what i'm doing well and when i'm doing badly i sort of thought how can i learn anything right that'll be one of those courses where everybody sits around and does poetry and they say oh here's my phone man war destruction boom fight and they okay so what would rousseau say well tolerate neither richmond or beggars okay so who in here has a gpa that's putting them into economic probation oh we mustn't allow any bakers so i'll give you guys a's how about those who have a 4-0 oh well we don't want that you you people are kind of like the rich people so i will give you bad grades so that we even out those gpas um maybe instead i should just say well no a's and no f's i actually had a third grade teacher in front nobody in my class is good enough to get an a still a great teacher she was better than my second grade teacher who locked me in a closet for an hour did i tell you that story yeah i was doing that you know we were counting by tens and she was holding up packs of pencils at 10 20 and i was the only person she went like this at one point to trick us i was the only person in the class who said 70. and so she locked me in a closet for an hour and i just yeah probably that's when i decided i would homeschool my own children a thought didn't go through but i think that's sort of what did it for me um yeah what would roll say well maximize the wealth for the least advantage give the best grades to those who otherwise would have the worst gpas for example what about aristotle he would say give the a's to the people who deserve them right there's a relevant kind of merit here match that marks would say who needs them occasionally students will come to my office and say you know i but i really need a higher grade i really want to get into medical school or the worst example is my first year here where in june mind you in june long after grades for the spring term have been submitted student calls me up and says professor bonavac i i really need an a in your course it's like but the course ended six weeks ago right um and actually you failed it and he said well um yeah i you know i had a lot going on but i've got this job in houston and it's my last requirement so i really need to have a grade in your course and i really could use it to be an a and i said so he said what can i do so my answer was you can build a time machine go back to january actually like come to my class take the exams and stuff and get an a um he didn't like this answer and so a few minutes later the phone rang again and it was his wife okay and she was like i can't believe he failed no we have to work mommy he was dead it's like oh my gosh i mean i looked at the records it was like the last time he showed up in my class was like january 28th okay like he never did anything how could i give him anything other than enough most of us think that needs argument isn't very satisfying what about the vegetable garden well who should get the tomatoes grown in your backyard aristotle might say well you you're the one who actually grew them or at least those with the most tomato merit but i guess growing them is some sign of tomato merit what would mark say those who need the tomatoes uh it might not be you at all well what would the others say well whatever maximizes maybe you should go down give them to the poor etc okay so what about my baseball well do i have the relevant kind of baseball merit there's somebody from 1979 with baseball merit dave parker he was one of my heroes yeah so now do i have the relevant kind of baseball merit well nozick says in the end the important question is how i got the basement so here's the story game five 1979 world series my brother and i are in the front row right by third base his it's a complicated story but basically we had tickets um two seats way up in the top level of the stadium but it turned out that my brother's roommate at carnegie mellon uh had an uncle who had these extra seasons he had season tickets and he had these extra tickets so we traded and swapped and and so on so we got these tickets so we're sitting right down there and in fact you can see my brother there very plainly i'm this guy next to him now what happens first inning um mike flanagan throws a pitch today parker dave parker fouls it off okay and it's headed at first i don't see where it's at it's up there in the air somewhere but everybody around us stands up and is going like this i guess oh it's coming to me okay or it's coming over here and doug de sensei the baltimore third baseman is running through the stands like this right toward me and i can't see the ball i'm looking up there i don't see it so what do i do okay now luckily this was like october 26th in pittsburgh okay it was cold it was about 40 degrees so i was wearing my father's old korean war field jacket which has big floppy pockets and i had my house stuffed in the potluck so here's what happens i'm going like this everybody else is going like this the bowl falls right into my pocket so luckily i reached my hand down before a bunch of other people do hang on it's like hey i got the ball now there it is there it actually is you can see the sensei coming over this is the ball actually hitting my brother's going like this i'm there you can barely see me kill him but yes i end up with the ball and so now everybody's walking away and i'm not gloating my brother's saying where'd the ball go actually this sort of story is exactly what i have to tell if you want to ask the question whether i deserve deserve the baseball and whether i hold it justly you have to know how i got it so nozick says look justice isn't a matter of judging overall structural distributions of inequality or something like that or levels of poverty it's not a question of examining whether this matches some natural dimension like needs or abilities or merit it's a question of how i got the baseball did i steal it well then i don't hold it justly but did i actually get it in a just way well then yes even if it was a way that was rather ignoble and did not display any merit of any kind nevertheless that doesn't matter the justice of a distribution depends on how it came about so he says look that's how we do it if i ask whether this is just i say well how did it happen how did it come about i need to look at the history so he says look if i'm trying to design a theory of distributive justice in general here's what i have to do i have to have a principle of acquisition how do people acquire holdings justly from nature now i didn't get this from nature but there are acquisitions from nature maybe i walk through the woods and i find something and i pick it up or actually today i was walking around campus and i found a pencil so i picked up the pencil that's not exactly an acquisition from nature but close enough that's actually how i get almost all my pencils i never buy them i just wander around campus and see them abandoned i pick them up i do that with cats too that's why i have 25 but with pencils yeah 25 pencils are easier to handle 25 casts so anyway there are ways of acquiring holdings justly from nature to spell this out in detail is actually really complicated you have to talk about the possession of land you have to talk about farming you have to talk about mineral rights oil and gas leasing and drilling and all of that so this is a complicated question there are lots of ways in which we acquire things from nature and some of those might be just some of them might be unjust so really there's not a simple philosophical theory of this there's a huge complicated body of law required to determine this then we have to have a principle of transfer how i transfer holdings justly if i own something justly then i can give it to someone else i can sell it to them for example i might buy something from someone else who holds it justly all those are legitimate ways of obtaining something justly but of course what is it to sell something justly to buy something justly to give someone something justly and so on all of that is complicated and again there's a big body of law about those kinds of commercial transactions about contracts about estates and wills and all that so this is a very complicated matter too and then finally rectification how i go about correcting earlier injustice so he says i can give you a sort of inductive definition of a just hold it's interesting chris kripke's causal theory of names is basically a recursive theory of naming and nozakir is giving us a recursive theory of justice so they're both inspired by computer science really that's the leading idea in the background the idea of recursive or inductive definitions and processes and they're both thinking of well naming in the one case and justice here in terms of that kind of recursive and inductive process if you don't know what recursion is then ignore what i just said but if you do a light bulb should be going off it's like oh cool okay they're paying attention to these things and using this in a philosophical theory so here's as it were the base case of the induction the beginning of the recursion somebody who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to it if you've grown that tomato on your land then it's your tomato okay that would be an example of this kind of acquisition from nature or you own that piece of land you drill on it you find oil you pump the oil the oil is yours then there would be a principle of transfer that would say someone acquiring holding in accordance with the principle of justice and transfer from someone holding us is also entitled to it okay and so that's going to govern how we buy things how we sell things how we give things how we inherit things all sorts of things like that now if the world were perfect if nothing ever went wrong he said we could really just stop there and that would be it you can either acquire something justly from nature or you can acquire it from someone who holds it justly however things sometimes go wrong there are accidents there are injuries there are harms so for example that's my car that i drove for 20 years and then some idiot pulled right in front of me as i was going through a green light and boom it was gone okay but that was an injustice there something went wrong there i there was an injury to me into my car or much worse this is what happened to my daughter's car when the same thing happened she was a student here driving near campus somebody went through a red light and she got hit by a truck going for like 45 miles an hour right right by the irwin center corner of the access road and 19th street mlk and that was the result um she's alive but it's kind of an amazing thing guy at the junkyard when i took her to see the car was like wait you you drove that car you lived it was it was kind of amazing anyway sometimes things do go wrong either accidentally or because somebody engages in some kind of wrongful activity and so well we have to say how to set things right again so there's going to have to be a principle of rectification talking about how someone who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in recovery rectification is entitled to it so how do we set things right again this is going to include the entire law of torts of injuries lawsuits you know where somebody sues some somebody for something else a liability we're going to have to think in terms of accidents and compensation and all sorts of workers compensation all that there's a huge body of law again that we'll have to specify the details but then the idea is no one is entitled to a holding except in one of those ways that's how you get something just you get it justly from nature or you get it from someone else who holds it justly or you're given it as compensation for some kind of injury or injustice or accident or something like that that's it here's an equivalent definition i hold something justly if and only if there's a chain of holdings back to an original acquisition from nature with no uncorrected injustices so where do i get my shirt for example well maybe from a retailer where's the retailer getting maybe from a wholesaler where does that person get it from a factory let's say they get the materials from which they made the shirt from a cloth maker that person got the cotton to weave the cloth from a cotton farmer that person got their cotton from naked by growing and so if all of those are either okay or at least any injustices within the chain have been corrected then i own the shirt justly yeah in this case it was goodwill which has a surprising array of men's clothing for very reasonable prices it's not true for women the women's clothes they were awful but men i guess lots of men who are kind of affluent get fat and they give really nice clothes away awesome how would you know though how would you know how would you know that they never did an injustice oh okay brilliant yes there are a number of things you can say in criticism of nozick's theory and i think one of the deepest is look this is trivial right and in a lot of cases these chains go back very long time so for one thing how far back do i have to look and secondly how do i actually know for example was there an injustice in the production of this shirt i don't know what if somebody stole this shirt from somebody and then took it to goodwill how would i know that right i don't know who the person was who gave it to good will or how i i you know so it's like yeah i can't trace this or the justice of the cotton farmer i mean is it really just that that person owns the field what if they actually tricked somebody else out of the cotton field in the first place oh well then maybe they don't actually and so if you think especially that our society has been filled with deep sources of injustice such that lots and lots of chains if you go back very far are going to end up looking unjust you're going to think wait a minute actually the whole weight of this theory is going to be tossed onto the principle of rectification and we're going to be asked to determine lots of things that we are in no position to determine who actually grew the cotton that went into this shirt i have no idea i have no way of finding out and so you might say look you have no way of knowing whether that chain of engine of chain of holdings actually satisfies this criterion or not and you might say look that's most of the time the position we're in so i think it's a very good objection to say wait a minute according to this theory i almost never know whether my holdings are just now if we look at the baseball we can see an illustration of that how did i get it well before me the last person to touch it was mike flanagan and before that rick dempsey the baltimore catcher and before that well he was given the ball by entire jim mckean and he got it from major league baseball and baseball got it from rawlings they got it from their factory in costa rica pictured here um well it was made of cork rubber wool cotton polyester latex leather all of those ultimately came from nature but now i say aha see i own the thing justly because the way i got it but now you say wait a minute wait a minute tell me about conditions in costa rica in that factory i said oh look even look inside the factory see people are happy and they're making these balls and costa rica's a just society and blah blah blah blah you say wait where'd they get the cot where'd they get the polyester how about the leather did they kill the animals justly etc and all of a sudden you can start thinking wait a minute wait a minute this is this is really complicated so partly our objection to rawls to rousseau and people like that was look you're asking these large-scale questions you're going to imply that almost nothing i have i can know to be just but here it's going to look really similar actually because i make all of this dependent on these historical chains i may really have no way of knowing whether i hold this justly or not well here's his general idea a distribution is just if everyone's holdings under adjust and that means a distribution is just if it results from another distributed just distribution by legitimate means so here is his slogan from each as they choose two each as they are chosen okay what makes things just as this points out and by the way this looks like a pattern theory but people's choices are not a natural dementia so in fact it's not a pattern theory but his idea is this do i hold my job justly well how did i get it if i bribed somebody to get this job at the university of texas then the answer would be no if i cheated in some way then the answer would be no but really how did it happen that i got this job well people freely chose to hire me okay there was a position they interviewed lots of people they decided i was the person they wanted and they chose to offer me that job right i chose to accept it and so in the end it comes down to people's free choices and it's really saying look that's what makes a condition just or unjust is it the result of people's free choices in which case it's just or is it the result of coercion of trickery of deceit of manipulation then it's unjust okay and so it's really people's choices that end up determining whether people hold things justly now i suppose if you want to be serious about it you could say well yeah let's think more about the rules under which i got this baseball right because it was hit into the stands i was allowed to keep it now that's the general practice in baseball now if something's hit into the stands you get to keep it but it wasn't always that way why did it change well that would be relevant because if it turned out to change because of let's say some sort of coercion people put guns to owner's head and said we want the baseballs then you might say there's an injustice to that actually does anybody know when the rule changed why people are allowed to keep baseballs that were into the stands no um quick history lesson relevant actually since this is a historical theory there's only one person who's ever died in a major league baseball game and that was ray chapman the cleveland shortstop in 1920. there was a sort of game that was dragging on into late afternoon it was getting kind of dusky it was an overcast day carl mays was the pitcher for the yankees he was a notorious fastball pitcher who was also known to like to brush batters back in any case he threw an inside pitch to chapman this was before batting helmets the ball hit chapman right in the temple he didn't see it in time and he fell over dead okay baseball changed the rules at that point the ball that he that hit him was was one that had been in play for a long time it was a rather dirty ball um you can see this was not in play for very long at all but you can see where parker hit it um it's already kind of you know from less than one inning of play it's messed up if something's been in play for like six innings seven innings by then it was a dark ball it was hard to see and so people realized this is unsafe so it led to a number of changes and the main one was to keep replacing the baseball so they were fresh baseballs it's by the way what ended the dead ball era nobody intentionally juiced up the baseballs to make the home run hitting of the 1920s possible it was just that they were throwing new balls into play all the time instead of playing with the same ball for the whole game in any case that's really where it came from so it was in short the result of people's free choices it was not the result of coercion or manipulation or deceit or anything of that sort now nozick says this actually implies important things about social arrangements pick some distribution that would be just according to some other principle an end result principle for example or a pattern theory like marxis or aristotle's and then his point is even if all people's needs are met for example even if all conditions of that theory of justice are satisfied people may transform that into some other distribution by engaging in free activity his example concerns will chamber will chamberlain realizes he's very good at basketball he starts playing basketball people pay money to will chamberlain to see him play basketball we started out with a just let's say highly equal distribution but after this it turns out there's a great deal of inequality all those people are a little poorer in monetary terms because they bought basketball tickets and chamberlain let's say gets rich is that fair now here's the dilemma well if you say yes you've got a historical theory here's why it's just because you had a just distribution and people then justly and freely chose to give some of their money in the chamber or here's another alternative you could say no no because now there's a high degree of inequality however that means your theory at some point has to limit freedom and this is true even if your theory doesn't care about inequality but just cares about levels of poverty maybe some people get addicted to basketball they spend all their money on basketball games okay and so they spend all their time doing this they spend all their money they're not poor because they've gone to so many basketball games um well yeah that's possible but is that fair you might say hey it's unfair that person's sound poor and chamberlain's rich or you but then you've got to do something to limit people's free choices or you're going to say well yes because it came about through people's free choices from a just distribution so his point in the end is that only a historical theory respects people's freedom end result pattern theories he says require constant interference in people's lives here's a little graphic that's meant to illustrate that so here's his slogan finally in the end socialist societies would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting and false and of course that's what just what socialist societies do they forbid capitalist tax among consenting adults they require that certain kinds of transfers go a certain way or they impose taxes that change the shape of people's free choices or as in a lot of countries with socialized medicine for example they just make it illegal for anybody to see a doctor outside of the official process and so in various ways as we'll see socialist societies do have to end up interfering with people's liberty now let's take a look at the history of the 1970s it's relevant to what we were talking about last time it also taught relevant to the circumstances in which nozick developed this theory the 60s were a time of great idealism great hope the 70s were a time of hard realities and people's hopes crashing you might say against the rocks of reality let's start with the presidency of richard nixon pictured there or here painted by norman rockwell they're kind of down home american ways he served as a congressman then as president eisenhower's vice president ran for actually we know all this because we've studied kripke uh lost to jfk then again ran eight years later defeated hubert humphrey in a very close election but was re-elected in a landslide in 1972. well what went on during nixon's presidency there was great progress you might have thought in the vietnam war he started withdrawing u.s troops from vietnam in 1969 when he took office there were over half a million soldiers uh american soldiers in vietnam just a year later there were only 334 000 um a year after that the number had been cut in half then in 1972 only to 24 000 in 1973 it was down to 50. um i'm grateful to nixon for this because i've had a very high draft number in 1972 and if he hadn't done that i would have been in vietnam but anyway as it happened the numbers went down so dramatically that the draft ended now he nevertheless got into a great deal of political trouble one editor said there's got to be a bloodletting we make we've got to make sure nobody ever thinks of doing this again now doing this what what was it that nixon had done that made so many people hate him and in particular so many people in the press scene the watergate scandal emerged if at first in the 1972 election um occupied the headlines for about two years finally led to nixon's resignation in 1974 and the result of that was a loss of faith in leadership and a shift of power from the executive branch to congress but that returns us to the question well why what were people so upset about it really had nothing to do with what nixon did in office it had to do with his history now what in nixon's history would have made people hate his guts i mean eisenhower was a popular president being his vice president that wasn't something that would make somebody unpopular or hated well no i mean he was getting us out of vietnam actually and things were going well there by this time so actually that wasn't something most people have said about this checkers oh the checkered scandal and all of that yeah about i mean there was some of that but i think that was sort of water along out of the bridge um exactly it was the investigation of elder hiss and the activities of the house on american activities committee and all of that okay so it's really his connection to the anti-communism of the early 1950s that made people hate him so much in any case there's the watergate complex where a burglary took place of democratic national headquarters in 1972 uh five people were arrested and there are a number of questions that emerged almost immediately and really have never been answered why exactly did people break into the headquarters what were they looking for who authorized it in particular how up high up the chain did any of this go and what did the president know and when that became the big question at the time what did the president know and when did he know it um really in a certain sense we don't know the answers to those questions even now despite the fact that it turned out the president was recording everything that happened in the oval office and in the end those tapes were released i remember reading those transcripts and being shocked at the not the immorality of what was going on mostly at the utter of triviality what was going on like really presents just worry about that what a waste of time anyway this led to congress passing the war powers resolution which basically demanded congressional approval for any military action uh every president since has declared it unconstitutional but it's never actually been challenged in court so it's not clear what the supreme court would say about it if it were a challenge in any case almost every president shows respect for it before he's elected and then ignores it and says it's unconstitutional another dramatic event 1973 the arab israeli war also known as the yom kippur war egypt and syria launched a surprise attack against israel and pushed heavily into very far into israel before finally being turned back mostly as a result of israeli air power then there was an oil embargo that followed that by the opec countries that raised the price of oil dramatically uh really not only in the united states but throughout the world and that had tremendous economic impacts here is a graph of oil prices you can see them this is in constant 2005 dollars per barrel it was under 10 a barrel up until 1973 and you see the price skyrocket to 50 a barrel so it jumped the price of oil by more than five times overnight so it led to tremendous disruptions a gallon of gas was 19 cents before this happened i remember it well suddenly it was over a dollar and we were all outraged now that doesn't sound so bad except that well a dollar in 1973 was worth about five dollars now so actually it's significant in any case it went down little and then there was another of these spikes due to another embargo in 1979 and since then it's well been all over the place now there were serious economic effects a slowdown throughout the us and europe a transfer of wealth from the west to oil producing countries inflation the bretton woods agreement where governor governments abandoned the gold standard and decided to set up the current uh floating currency exchange a dollar in 1973 is worth about five dollars and 10 cents today so there's been very significant inflation i i hesitate to tell you what i paid in tuition room and board completely for an education at an elite private school in 1973. it was about my tuition room and board all combined at one of the most expensive schools in the country was three thousand dollars okay so that was worth fifteen thousand today but still yeah an education at haverford swarthmore yale harvard and all those places was about 15 000 a year then we thought that was very expensive and that's in today's dollars i mean it was three thousand dollars and i need seventy three dollars okay well anyway yeah i'll skip that here's what's happened to the stock market over time and you can see here yeah oh actually it's really hard to read that isn't it this is gen you can see the 60s here a sharp increase and then this is the 70s basically just a flat period of things up and down but really ultimately going nowhere so the economy really just stalled for an entire decade in 1974 nixon because of the watergate scandal resigned here is he is surrounded by his family making the announcement and there he is getting on board the helicopter to take him away from the white house he could just never leave that campaign gerald ford then became president ford is the only president never to have been elected as president or vice president um no one ever voted for gerald ford well they did later in 1976 but by this point they had not voted for him he had been a congressman from michigan for many years um he was probably our most athletic president he was somebody who had been a football star at the university of michigan um nevertheless the press portrayed him as bumbling um every time he bumped his head on a helicopter or something they would write it up as if he was like doofus it was very strange in any case he had become vice president when spiro agnew who had been nixon's vice president resigned as a result of unrelated scandals and right around the time he took over congress passed a budget act that transformed the way congressional budgeting was done it basically took a lot of power that had been part of the executive branch put it in congress removed the president's power to empower us in funds and really ever since there have been federal deficits um here is national debt for citizen where you can see that yeah right around 1974 things had been flat national debt wasn't really much of a problem then it starts growing and it's kept on growing um or here it is by various presidents and you can see things were around one percent basically just statistical noise until ford and then well yeah um it's gotten worse and worse over time with the exception of bill clinton so yeah there's yeah it's sort of well yeah but you notice the trend i mean more alarming than any individual here is just the overall trend which suggests the whole federal system is out of control now there was another severe consequence congress halted the bombing of north vietnam and banned american military involvement of any kind in southeast asia they cut funds to south vietnam and once the democrats took congress in 1974 they cut funding off completely the result was that the south vietnamese army all of a sudden couldn't even run their jeeps couldn't run their tanks they had no money and so not very long after that saigon fell april 1975 a war that people thought had been won was suddenly lost here are people getting onto the last helicopter out of saigon you see the scramble as people realize their lives depend on getting out after the fall millions of people were sent to re-education camps where they were tortured deprived of food and medical care some stayed in these camps for as long as 17 years hundreds of thousands died in addition to that hundreds of thousands died trying to leave vietnam they became known as the boat people people who got into boats and tried to get to thailand or to indonesia or malaysia or anywhere they could get uh over shark and pirate infested waters to try to escape well was the whole war of failure in some sense yes on the other hand it was motivated in part by the domino theory and indeed laos in cambodia fell but a variety of countries did remain free despite communist threats in all of those countries

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

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Id: 5qXcTHRy-7k

Length: 47min 50sec (2870 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2013